Lethal lunch boxes and the infestation of fear: Column

Oct. 19, 2013
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A lunch box featuring Rod Serling. / Robert Hanashiro, USA TODAY

by Lenore Skenazy, USATODAY

by Lenore Skenazy, USATODAY

As PTAs across America swing back into action, parents are worried about grades, tests, bake sales (where still allowed), and, nowadays, contamination.

At my sons' public school in Manhattan a few years back, one of the moms wanted to ban whiteboards because she feared the fumes given off by dry-erase markers. Another was upset she had to give her son a brown bag lunch for a field trip -- not his usual insulated bag. What if his sandwich spoiled and he got food poisoning?

The opposite worry reared up just recently when a friend forwarded me a post from the website ChildrensMD titled, "Are Your School Supplies Safe?" It warned that toxic chemicals are present in vinyl "lunch boxes, binders and rain gear" at higher levels than permitted in toys, and suggested we toss our kids' licensed character lunchboxes.

This makes sense only if your kid is now excruciatingly embarrassed by his former favorite superhero. Because while the site warns about exposing our children to plastic softeners -- the same kind found in everything from shower curtains to hospital tubing, so we'd have a lot of avoiding to do -- it's exposing us parents to something far more dangerous and viral: Fear. The fear that anything less than an organic grape (cut into quarters) is out to hurt our children.

For vinyl to pose a danger, "Your kid would need to eat their lunch box," says Trevor Butterworth,of George Mason University's Statistical Assessment Service, a non-profit that examines the way the media and government use statistics.

Worrying about ordinary school supplies represents what I call "worst-first thinking" -- thinking up the WORST case scenario FIRST, and proceeding as if it's likely to happen. We see it when parents wonder if they can let their kids walk to school: "What if they get KIDNAPPED?" Or post their kids' pictures: "What if they get STALKED?" As for chemicals, worst-first treats them all like battery acid.

This fear seeps -- just like a toxin! -- into the schools. So a kindergarten teacher in Wisconsin told me she is now required to fill out a Material Safety Data Sheet on all the "chemicals" in her classroom, including baby wipes and dish soap. A mom in Colorado sent me the school rules for her kids' science fair project: "No microbial cultures, fungi, molds, bacteria, parasites. No flammable substances. No chemicals."

I guess they can study pen caps.

The fear is spreading so far and wide that recently, the ultra-progressive city of Portland, Oregon, voted to reject a plan to fluoridate its water â?? one of the greatest public health achievements of the 20th century!

I can't blame parents or even school boards for fretting this way, because we are bombarded by constant warnings: "Is your child's ________ safe?" But no matter how the news shows spin it, the answer is: Usually, yes. As Geoffrey Kabat, an epidemiologist at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, puts it, "We live in the safest environment that has ever existed in history."

What we do not live in is absolute safety, and that's what gives fear-mongers all the juice they need to jangle our nerves.

Allowing your kids to tote a vinyl lunch box is just not a danger worth worrying about. Neither is an uninsulated bag.